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lukeblundell 's review for:
Underworld
by Don DeLillo
I have no doubt that DeLillo is a good writer, and that he has a lot of big ideas he wants to dive into. But most of these images only turn out to be flashes and pale imitations of great ideas other people have put before him, especially poetic ones like Pynchon with the bomb, or DFW with televised entertainment. I don't think there's anything original here, it never dives deep enough to fish for something that hasn't been caught before. And whilst I can enjoy the texture, feel the words breathing, or pulsing, or rotating so it catches the light, a gruffled voice reading a phonetically pleasing paragraph, spin and grit, tacturn, palpable; quite a lot of it are just word choices which make absolutely no sense when you really pick them apart. A lot of it is like that sentence, bascially. I'm sure it's all soothing when read aloud by an old man with a hoarse voice, but there's really a lot of waffle in the descriptions. For a systems novel (which I feel alright in calling it that), its sentimental heart – if it has one – is few and far between; maybe you see it once every hundred pages, because it's too obsessed with the exteriority of its aesthetic pull (especially poetically), than the interiority of what these characters want or are willing to express about themselves – and I definitely don't think it offers enough subtext to ask the reader to root for it themselves. A literary colossus? I think what you see is what you get. Good ideas, but rather shapeless.